Dialogue as Discourse: Controlling Global Properties of Scripted Dialogue

Natural Language Generation in Spoken and Written Dialogue

Volume

Papers from the 2003 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

This paper explains why scripted dialogue shares some crucial properties with discourse. In particular, when scripted dialogues are generated by a Natural Language Generation system, the generator can apply revision strategies that cannot normally be used when the dialogue results from an interaction between autonomous agents (i.e., when the dialogue is not scripted). The paper explains that the relevant revision operators are best applied at the level of a dialogue plan and discusses how the generator may decide when to apply a given revision operator.